The Sydney Tea Festival is the place to be if you enjoy the hot beverage. It brings together tea sellers with unique tasting loose leaf and herbal teas from all over the world, from India to China and from Europe to Australia. It is truly a tea drinkers dream, or like us, you’re English and it’s inevitable you’ll end up wherever the tea is. We love our tea, in case you didn’t know.
In addition to this, there are also food stalls, sweet and savoury as well as and tea workshops that have tea specialist hosting educational sessions.
Sydney Tea Festival Location
The Sydney Tea Festival is located at Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh.
We would recommend taking public transport because of how effortless it is to get there via train. Then you only have a 10 min walk from Redfern train station, which is very convenient.
Carriageworks is an enormous contemporary multi-arts centre that brings together artists and audiences to discuss and show contemporary issues. However, Carriageworks also hosts events like the Sydney Tea Festival, so keep an eye out for future events.
Sydney Tea Festival Price
The tickets for the Sydney Tea Festival vary depending on the experience you choose. Keep in mind that our experience is based from the 6th anniversary of the Sydney Tea Festival 2019, so other years may vary in price.
General admission: $20.95 (Includes a tasting tea cup worth $5)
Children under 12: $0
Workshops: Prices vary
No concession or senior tickets
Tickets are only available online via moshtix, there are no ticket booths to purchase on the door, they scan your ticket which can be done on a device such as mobile or tablet, alternatively, printing the ticket is also an option.
We opted for the general admission ticket which included a free tasting tea cup each, worth $5. It is a cute little white porcelain cup with red or green printed writing ‘Sydney Tea Festival’. It is a nice keepsake memorial remembering the time you went tea tasting around the world, in Sydney. It’s also the perfect size for tasting samples of tea from the many stalls you will encounter, not to mention to fit in your bag to take home.
Sydney Tea Festival Workshops
The workshops vary year to year, so please visit moshtix for more information closer to the event date. Nonetheless, here are the workshops that were available to us and can be similarly expected in future tea festival events.
Interactive workshops & Talks
These workshops are perfect to dig deeper into the core of world-wide teas. Tea fanatics can truly immerse themselves in the historic qualities of different teas from each region and discover the secrets of the blends. Specialists will hold talks to educate audiences about their loose tea blends.
DIY tea blending station
If you made your own tea, how would it taste? Test your newly learnt skills in the art of tea blending by making your own tea blends. An array of loose-leaf tea, spices and flowers will be on offer to experiment with. What makes this DIY tea blending station experience even more cool, is that you name and label your own unique blend and can take it home with you.
Archie Rose Tea Cocktails
Tea and cocktails? Not something you would normally have in the same sentence but somehow it works. Check out this stall to try something new and be a bit more adventurous! They also have a range of beautifully crafted ever so popular gins, distilled in Sydney.
Kids crafty corner
The Sydney Tea Festival caters for everyone and that includes kids. Kids can craft their own ‘Tea party small world’ out of recycled materials and other crafts such as playdough. A bonus is that they can take their crafted masterpiece home to be enjoyed.
Our Sydney Tea Festival experience
As we arrived at the Sydney Tea Festival entrance at Carriageworks we were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of tea stalls available to us. We thought to ourselves, “How are we going to taste all these teas?”. It’s a good job we went early. Picking up our free porcelain tea tasting cup, we were set and ready to get tea drunk.
Indian Chai
Some of the stalls that first grabbed our attention were the Indian Chai tea stalls. Seeing the words ‘Chai’ written across tea stall banners immediately brought back memories of our time travelling India. We first tried chai on an overnight train in India, and the sweet but spicy beverage had us hooked. They were 2-3 Indian chai stalls but one of them stood out to us – Original Chai Co Moring Masala Chai, it rekindled the taste buds and brought us back to that overnight train. We bought a tin of it which contained the loose leaves and the spices, for $15.
Supporting the locals
What we didn’t expect to find at the Sydney Tea Festival was a stall selling honey. We love honey and even put it in our hot beverages from time to time. We sampled a few options and decided to buy a local Western Sydney honey called The Urban Beehive, a great tasting bargain for $10.
Tea & wine
Wine at a tea festival? Wine not. We were intrigued to taste the mixture and was not disappointed. There were 2 options available; Chardonnay & Camomile which states “A floral and fragrant palate with a backbone of golden apple and citrus from the Chardonnay grapes, enhanced by the infusion of organic Egyptian Camomile blossoms introducing a bright aroma with a touch of balanced sweetness.” or a Cabernet Sauvignon & Chai “Aromas of dark berries and bay leaf from the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes combined with the aromatic, traditional Chai spices ginger, cinnamon and pepper.” You guessed it, we chose the Cabernet Sauvignon & Chai. Red wine taste with a smooth spicy chai finish on the throat. Delightful. For $16 it was a steal. Check their website out for more information.
For those with a sweet tooth
Having a dessert stall within a tea festival is genius, they go hand in hand. Being dessert lovers ourselves, naturally our eyes and noses guided us to the stall. All the desserts served at that particular stall were vegan too. We opted for a brownie, which was very generous in size. It was heavy, dense and had more chocolate in it than needed. Perfect.
Final thoughts
A $20 ticket turned out to be a very enjoyable day, from getting tea drunk to tasting actual alcohol and eating desserts. We spent most the day there and if we are around or in Sydney next time when the festival is on, we would go again. Don’t hesitate to book your ticket and have a fun day out. Let us know in the comments if you have been to the Sydney Tea Festival before or any other tea festival, we’d love to know your thoughts.
Want more things to do in Sydney? Check out our Sydney blogs for more ideas!
